There’s a lot a university doesn’t teach. For example, it doesn’t teach your native Russian. Over the years I worked as an instructor, hundreds of student papers passed before my eyes: reports, abstracts, term papers, theses. Usually I start scribbling comments in the very first paragraph and send it back for revision after the first page.
What do students take as a model for their written style? Shitty sites like Habrahabr, where there is no editorial policy at all, where crooked translations of foreign articles get posted. Good technical-writing style can be found in old Soviet books (published before the 1980s), but who reads them these days? So I had to explain at least some elements of academic style to students orally.
One of this year’s discoveries was Maxim Ilyakhov’s informational style. I became interested in his work from the very first article, because he deals with exactly what student papers lack: the meaning of words, the meaning of the text. I’ve come across “crap” in term papers and theses, and using informational style is exactly what removes the “crap” from the text. It’s simply a feast for the eyes and the brain!
Read the mailing-list archive about informational style: http://maximilyahov.ru/blog/?go=all/availability/
Besides articles, Ilyakhov published an application that automates checking a text fragment for compliance with informational style: http://glvrd.ru/
Let’s look at a paragraph from the introduction of one student term paper:
Modern web technologies do not stand still. For many years now, website creation technologies have been continuously improving, and now the pace of their improvement is so high that textbooks manage to become significantly outdated even before publication. The main ones include the following: HTML(XHTML), CSS, JavaScript, PHP, Ajax, and WordPress.
And here is the result of processing it with “Glavred”:
Very convenient: the stop words are underlined, examples are shown, and there is a link to an explanatory article.
Informational style is mandatory for all students for any kind of work under my supervision. Don’t bring me papers without having read the “Glavred” mailing list.
They also have an amusing page on their site with a server error message.
